Israel May Attack Syria Over Chemical Weapons Cache

I've edited this for length. The entire article is linked at the bottom.

July 11, 2012

Hundreds of tonnes of Syria's stockpile of deadly nerve gas could fall into the hands of terrorist groups if the regime of Bashar al Assad falls apart amid widening concerns that Israel could go to war to try to stop this 'Doomsday threat'.

According to Middle Eastern and other intelligence sources, Syria has the biggest stockpiles of the nerve gasses: VX and Sarin as well as mustard gas, in the Middle East.

Investigations by Sky News have identified four sites where the agents are produced: Hama, Latakia, Al Safira, near Aleppo and at the Centre D'Etude et Recherche Scientifique laboratories in Damascus.

Storage sites have also been found at Khan abu Shamat, Furqlus, Hama, Masyaf, Palmyra.

Biological weapons are believed to be stored at Cerin while there are also numerous 'dual use' civilian pharmaceutical laboratories which are capable of producing bio-weapons such as botulism and anthrax.

Al Qaeda-related groups are known to be operating inside Syria. Its leadership has frequently extolled members or followers to try to get hold of chemical weapons.

The deadly chemical weapons have been successfully 'weaponised'. This means that conventional artillery and missile warheads have been fitted with delivery systems for VX gas. These include Scud B, C and D missiles.

These rockets are capable of hitting any location inside Israel and, Sky sources said, they are capable of spreading VX gas in bomblets similar to those seen in cluster munitions.

Syria has backed the Lebanese Islamist movement Hezbollah for decades. In 2006, Israel launched a bloody invasion of Lebanon in response to Hezbollah rocket attacks.

Today, intelligence sources say that they conservatively estimate that Hezbollah has a stockpile of more than 40,000 new missiles.

There are widespread fears that a Gaddafi-style collapse of Syria into chaos, would mean that chemical weapons would spread around the globe. The weaponisation means they can be moved easily and Sky sources in the region said that the Assad regime had dispersed the weapons to "dozens of different sites and into perpetually mobile columns". ( ya know, ol G.W. and his boys could have been right when they said, Saddam moved all of his WMD's to Syria, how would we know? )

Major general Yair Naveh, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Force, recently warned a private congregation at a Jerusalem synagogue that Syria's chemical weapons posed a mortal threat to the Jewish State.

"As for Syria, we all hear the news ... (if) Syrians ... behave this way to their people it is clear ... how they will behave towards us - to our sons - when they get the opportunity against us, with the largest chemical weapons arsenal in the world, with missiles and rockets that cover all of Israel".

In May, 12,000 special forces commandos spent almost a month training for the sort of scenario now presented by Syria.

But a Pentagon study suggested that 75,000 troops would be needed to secure Assad's chemical weapons arsenal. There seems little prospect of the US committing that kind of force, given tensions with Iran over its nuclear weapons programme.

"The truth is that no one has much of a clue what to do about Syria - it's too well defended and too full of weapons of mass destruction to mean that there can be any meaningful military intervention. The Syrians may be doomed if Assad stays, and lots of others if he falls," said one senior intelligence official in the region.

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They're are popular Think Tanks that believe 'as Syria goes, so goes the United States'.

Should the last of the Strong Men in the arabic world be defeated, muslim extremists will prevail. That concept shouldn't be difficult to understand. All of the powers that be in arab countries, with little exception, are now dominated by the MBH. If Assad goes, they say, the entire mid-east will be lost to us forever.

The one exception, Saudi Arabia, is still a force to be reckoned with. Although nineteen of the bombers involved in 9-11 were from Saudi Arabia, Including OBL, the United States maintains a close relationship with them. And well we should ( women's right's aside-although he is sending women to this years Olympics ).

Mursi ( Egypt's new honcho ) visited Saudi Arabia this past Thursday. He wanted to let king Abdullah know that the stability of the entire Gulf region was dependent on the relationship between the two countries ( Saudi Arabia sits at the mouth of the Gulf ). He was also there to try and assure them his intentions were, more or less, honorable and he had no intention of tipping the scale of power in the area to Iran.

Mursi's very first official visit, anywhere, was to see Abdullah. Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...secularism is on the rise in Saudi Arabia. Different factions are fighting one another for the very same reason they are fighting one another all over the mid-east. Shiite vs Sunni< both fighting > Al Qaeda. It doesn't matter, yet, who wins. Abdullah kills off the winners because they are all after him and his family.